Russia's Barbarism

"We went into the yard. People were injured."

"Then the cars caught fire. We tried to extinguish them with car fire extinguishers."

"And I got a little burned."

Viktor Bukhta, resident, Sviatoshynski district, Kyiv, Ukraine

"[I was] astonished by the complacency] of members of the organization [he leads, the International Atomic Energy Agency, relating to the dangers faced by the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant]."

"What are we doing to prevent this happening? We are the IAEA, we are meant to care about nuclear safety."

"Each time we are rolling a dice. And if we allow this to continue time after time, then one day our luck will run out."

 "Today's loss of all external power once again demonstrated how fragile and dangerous the situation is for the Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant."

IAEA Director-General Rafael Mariano Grossi

UN nuclear chief sounds alarm as Zaporizhzhia plant reconnected – video

“The occupiers can only terrorize civilians. That’s all they can do."

"But it won’t help them. They won’t avoid responsibility for everything they have done."

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy

A massive missile and drone barrage was unleashed on Thursday by the Russian military, smashing into residential buildings and critical infrastructure across Ukraine. The large, wide-ranging attack placed the largest nuclear plant in Europe at risk, knocking off the power grid used by such plants for the constant power required to operate their cooling systems in avoidance of a meltdown. This represents the latest threat to the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, raising the spectre of a catastrophic nuclear event.

 

All throughout Thursday night, air raid sirens blared, while the attacks were geared to target a wide swath of the vast country. Western Ukraine, far from the front lines, was not immune to this attack. The assault, according to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, arrived while people slept; an attempt by Moscow "to intimidate Ukrainians again". 

 

The strikes, according to the Russian Defence Ministry, were justifiable as retaliation for the recent incursion into the Bryansk region of western Russia by Ukrainian 'saboteurs'. The Russian accusation was denied by Ukraine, warning that these allegations would be used by Moscow to justify an increase in its assaults against Ukraine. That the incursion over the border was carried out by Ukrainian servicemen to show Russians that they aren't immune to the same kind of treatment their country is imposing on Ukraine, is another matter altogether.

 

The battlefield has been quiescent over the winter months despite that Kremlin forces mounted a strategy to target the Ukrainian power supply in late fall; a strategy to demoralize and strike apprehension into the Ukrainian population, facing the winter without heating, water and any comfort from the cold. The plan went awry when the Ukrainian population remained defiant and trusted their government to employ all means to repeatedly restore energy.

 

When the attacks became sporadic and less frequent, it led to speculation by military analysts that Russia might be running low on ammunition. Mid-February saw the last major bombardment. But on Thursday, Russia launched 81 missiles and eight exploding Iranian-manufactured Shahed drones, according to Valerii Zaluzhnyl, Ukraine's chief commander of the armed forces. Of the total strikes, 34  missiles were intercepted, along with four drones.

Air defences found it difficult to cope with the onslaught, given the mixture of munitions. Six hypersonic Kinzhal cruise missiles were among the weapons striking Ukraine. These missiles represent the most sophisticated weapons in the Russian arsenal; Ukraine has no air defences capable of intercepting them. The Russian Defence Ministry boasted that the barrage hit military and industrial targets "as well as the energy facilities that supply them".

A villager passes by debris of private houses ruined in Russia's night rocket attack in a village, in Zolochevsky district in the Lviv region, Ukraine, Thursday, March 9, 2023. (AP Photo/Mykola Tys)

The truth is, Russia doesn't really care what it hits; targeting civilian infrastructure along with military emplacements. And once again, as has happened repeatedly, with disastrous results, civilian areas were struck, homes and apartment blocks hit with predictable results, the buildings destroyed. Fortunately, loss of life was minimal, but then those that die had no intention of abandoning life. There was no damage to the army's combat capability as a result of the missile strikes, 

It is, however, an assured tactic that in sending the barrage right across the country far from the front lines, it is the population that is being targeted with intimidating tactics; kept on edge, never knowing where the next missile will strike, and whether they will be deprived of home, and possibly their very lives and those of their loved ones. Escape to bomb shelters in the middle of the night is not a particularly comforting prospect; it saves lives, but cannot preserve a sense of equanimity.

Forensic police survey the fragments of missiles that fell near a residential building in Kyiv’s Sviatoshynskyi district. Photograph: Alessio Mamo/The Guardian

An estimated fifty percent of households in the capital, Kyiv, were without heat. The same situation prevailed in Ukraine's second largest city, Kharkiv, where water was also cut. The temperature hovers around the freezing mark, deprivation of heat and of water is a miserable experience. And this is precisely what Moscow envisions in store for the population of Ukraine, to apply pressure to its government to agree to a cessation of hostilities, completely on Moscow's terms. Primarily for Kyiv to accept the loss of a third of its territory -- for starters.

In the northwestern Zhytomyr region, hundreds of thousands of households were without power. In Odessa, emergency blackouts resulted from damaged power lines. The IAEA has teams of experts at all four of Ukraine's nuclear power plants, with the intention of reducing the risk of severe accidents. 

"No military objective, just Russian barbarism", tweeted Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba, scathingly. According to Kyiv's city administration, the capital was attacked both with missiles and exploding drones, many of which were intercepted, despite which the city's energy infrastructure was hit and damaged.

How Much Longer This Round? And The Next? And The Next?

"Netanyahu was on the ropes at the beginning of this week. The opposition parties were poised to muster a majority."

"Netanyahu's preoccupation with his own political and legal problems is part of the reason that he has not reined in the Israeli police's heavy-handedness in Jerusalem, and part of this rapid escalation of the crisis can be explained by that preoccupation."

"He is under a huge amount of criticism in Israel, especially over the breakdown of law and order within Israel in mixed Jewish-Arab towns. That said, there is a silver lining for him here."

Anshel Pfeffer, biography author of the Israeli Prime Minister

Rockets launched by Hamas have hit Ashkelon, southern Israel  Reuters

 

Suddenly, the 'government of change', on the cusp of seeing Benjamin Netanyahu dismissed as prime minister, are themselves dismissed by the trajectory of events that has roiled Israel and the Gaza Strip. Unwittingly, the terrorist group Hamas favoured the current prime minister to extend his experienced stay as the helm of executive government administration by their own self-serving move to demonstrate to the Arab world and Palestinians in particular that they have the courage to bomb Israeli civilian enclaves.

Israel is now imploding within and without. The Israel Defence Forces have the 'without' explosions well in hand, and under the direction of the prime minister will carry on their dual task of protecting the Israeli population through coordinated defence strategies while teaching the basic elements of assaultive conflict reversed with a conscientious view to preserving human life as much as it is in their capacity to do so, to a self-proclaimed enemy of the Jewish state which they feel entitled to destroy.

Hamas has enjoyed considerable assistance from the Islamic Republic of Iran, the theocratic Islamist government whose major achievement has been to foster the formation and weaponizing of terrorist militias loyal to Iran. The arsenal of deadly weapons that Hamas has been enabled to amass has come courtesy of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' Quds Force for whom the destruction of Israel represents a priority goal.

 

Israelis clean up a rocket-damaged synagogue in Ashkelon  Reuters

 

The late, lamented Qassim Soleimani, sent on a pilgrimage to Paradise by former U.S.President Donald Trump in collaboration with unnamed sources, was  happily responsible for Iran's connection with Hamas, taking personal responsibility for orchestrating the arms buildup of Hamas, enabling the terrorists to make fast and loose with their expendable rockets and missiles in the knowledge that some of them would find their targets -- and they have.

Israel is leaning slightly back in its shock over the plenitude of the rocket barrages barrelling through the night-time sky crossing the border from Gaza into Israel, hitting border communities, coastal enclaves and central Israel, creating a challenge for the missile-busting Iron Dome defence system in a creative endeavour to overcome the system's capacity through sheer volume of attacks. Lest Hamas celebrate too soon, the Iron Dome is managing to stop those rockets bearing down on populated areas.

And leaving those that misfire, falling back into Gaza, to create victims there, to fall where they may, even though Hamas's public relations will relay to the collaborative media and the international community at large, that Palestinian deaths -- mostly women, children and babies of course, with special emphasis on the malice of Arab-hating Jews -- are all on Israel's vicious head. Israeli civilians caught in the maelstrom; the elderly, infirm and children, both Jewish and Arab, hit by rocket blasts are also Israel's fault. For provoking Hamas by refusing its bellicose orders.

 

Suzy, six, was rescued from rubble in Gaza City on Sunday, but five members of her family died   Reuters

 

The sturm und drang has had its dramatic effect, leading Israeli-Arab and Israeli-Jewish youth to emulate what is occurring externally, by calling out the thugs in each of them, leading them to assault one another, to threaten and commit crimes against each other in their dark vision of the enemy within, to loot and to torch schools and places of worship, and to generally make a  heroic effort to undo all the patient effort on both 'sides' to go along to get along.

The world, fed a long diet of 'pro-Palestinian' sympathy, is convinced that the heavy hand of Israeli authority has impeded free access to the Islamic world's third most sacred site in Islam, compounding the stress between Jew and Arab in Israel through a scenario where a few Israeli-Arab families have been informed they must vacate addresses whose properties are the legal possession of Jewish owners, when in fact, the crux of the matter is a Palestinian Authority administration in the West Bank that has reneged, once again, on its promise of an imminent election.

Trouble is, when Mahmoud Abbas, the current President of the PA, elected for a four-year term 14 years ago, suddenly remembered/realized/recoiled at the realization that he and his Fatah party are less popular than the equally democratically-flawed Hamas party, and election results just might make that abundantly clear. So he called off the scheduled election, claiming that Israel's oppressive manner toward Palestinians has forced him to that decision.

And the Hamas 'authorities' took it from there, to a) demonstrate to the Palestinian voters that they have the courage that Fatah/Abbas lacks, to face down the Israelis by rocket and missile attacks, penetrating 'the enemy's' defences, killing its people, destroying its infrastructure as promised in their charter, ostensibly popularizing themselves even further, and b) by their cleverly-designed strategies to mire the IDF in a conflict where rockets are fired from within civilian enclaves, luring a response to hit that enclave and exact civilian casualties; Voila!,another public relations coup results.

Too pleased with their cleverness to see past the ruse that the IDF had in store when it called up troops to mass on the Israel/Gaza border and allow media to report that a ground invasion was imminent, activating a process whereby Hamas leaders ordered their fighters into the network of tunnels in preparation for responding to any such ground invasion, allowing the IDF the opportunity to seal off entrances and exits by well-aimed explosive devices, trapping both Hamas terrorists and their cache of weapons within.